Conference Theme
This year's theme is “Writing at Intersections.” We encourage presentations that consider the way writing shapes the core of our professional lives, the way it helps us establish multi-layered and multi-faceted connections—with high school students, with college students, with other colleagues and other disciplines, with technology. In an ideal world, these connections would be smooth, seamless, and effective; in the real world, however, we face unexpected curriculum changes or difficult, unstable budgets that make such connections hard to establish and maintain. We invite proposals that will explore how we can build these important writing bridges despite the inevitable bumps on the road.
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Conference Schedule
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Room 203
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
Updating our Status as Writing Teachers: Using Students' Online-Writing Skills in the Composition Classroom
Alicia Rosman
Oregon State University
What kinds of writing are our freshmen composition students doing outside the classroom? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we use the skills they’re using to teach writing? From updating their statuses on social network sites like Facebook to keeping blogs rather than journals, today’s students are more tech savvy than ever before and are members of a generation whose literacy narrative is more and more interwoven with technology. As writing teachers, it is our responsibility to be aware of this technology and to find ways to utilize it in our classrooms.
This presentation will offer an overview of popular online writing mediums and how students are using them outside the classroom. Specifically, it will focus in on how writing teachers can both integrate this technology in the classroom as well as appeal to the skill-sets associated with using them. I will offer specific tools to use in the classroom as well as cite foundational texts and studies on the current conversation surrounding this field.
“Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century”
Daniel Randlemon
Oregon State University
One of the most important and most challenging intersections facing teachers of writing today is the notion of twenty-first century literacies. What exactly is meant by terms like “twenty-first century literacies,” “multimodal literacies,” and “new media texts”? This question has emerged as an important and timely intersection in the teaching of composition. Many teachers of writing have been trained to teach traditional print literacies; however, over the past two decades, teachers and scholars have begun to wonder about the ways that the Internet and new technologies affect modes of composition, and also how new literacies that have sprung up out of these technological advances can be implemented into the writing classroom.
This presentation is designed to introduce teachers of writing to some of the most significant opportunities, insights, and challenges that scholars and teachers have identified regarding writing in the twenty-first century, as well as some how gaining a better understanding of such a topic can benefit the everyday teacher of writing. Those who attend this presentation will leave with a clearer understanding of how to navigate the intersection of traditional print literacies and twenty-first century literacies. Throughout the course of the presentation, I will offer an overview of twenty-first century literacies, introduce attendees to some specific resources like the MacArthur Foundations site for Digital Media and Learning, and propose straightforward assignment ideas for implementing twenty-first century literacies into every writing classroom.
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
“Fresh Eyes on Freshman Composition: Energizing the classroom through techniques that let students ‘be writers’”
April Carothers
Western Oregon University
In 1990, Robert J. Connors described freshman composition instructors as a “…permanent underclass … oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised.” Depressing words that are possibly more true today than ever before. More and more colleges and universities are hiring part time, temporary instructors where once there were permanent positions, even tenure-track positions. Those of us who feel called to teach composition find ourselves hitting the glass ceiling with force.
Add the fact that freshman composition has always been a particularly difficult course to teach, one that most students are required to take in order to achieve any degree. Working conditions combine with student reluctance to create an environment that anyone would find discouraging, with no relief currently in sight. Connors called for major changes in the way the course is administered, yet it is certain that nothing will change before next term starts. We have gone into survival mode.
This paper examines how to motivate ourselves by considering the long standing question of what freshman composition is for. The simple answer—“to teach them to write correctly”—is not enough. What students need has been demonstrated in recent research: a sense of exchange between themselves and their teachers, who represent the college environment. The freshman composition classroom must become a workshop where students experience what it means to be read, heard, and responded to… not a gateway course but a bridge, creating connections that energize teachers and guide students toward what it means to be a college level writer.
Collective knowledge in the composition classroom
Katherine Ristau
Western Oregon University
The term begins so easily. Our students are excited about peer reviewing; they are interested to hear what their peers have to say and how they can refine their own writing. As the term progresses, the excitement wanes. Sure, they are doing the work, but are they applying it to their own essays? When the final peer review arrives, the students are clearly mailing it in – filling in the blanks but not thinking outside of the box. As composition teachers, we try to fight this apathy with a range of different strategies. But how can we move our students beyond the siren’s call of the peer review instructions? How can we compel them to critically consider their peer’s arguments? This paper suggests we approach the final peer review with an emphasis on the collective knowledge of the classroom, offering an activity to get our students engaged and responsive to their peer’s work. Ultimately, the reflexive activity will encourage our students to view their peer’s work from a fresh angle, and motivate them to apply what they have learned to their own written work.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
Writing Matters: Discovering the Intersections Between Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogies, Or: Ways In Which It’s All the Same
Andrea Ardans
Oregon State University
Wendy Bishop, creative writer and composition scholar, writes, “I can no more imagine being a writing teacher who does not write than I can imagine being one who does not read…I teach writing precisely because I love these two intimately connected activities.” As a creative writer who teaches composition, I identify with Bishop, and am fascinated by the ways in which the pedagogies of creative writing and composition intersect. In this presentation, I explore the commonalities of these two seemingly disparate writing practices and their pedagogies in order to illuminate the ways in which these pedagogies can inform and enhance one another, rather than continue to exist on separate planes within our minds and classrooms. Bishop advocates for others “to become part of a company of writer-scholar-teachers who aim to make their practices more pleasurable,” and this presentation does the same, by exploring why it’s important for us to stop separating our writer-selves from our teacher-selves. Rather than arguing a particular claim, this presentation utilizes personal reflection and scholarly work to explore pedagogical intersections and generate practical ways to integrate these intersections in both the creative writing and composition classrooms.
The Intersection Between Creative and Academic Writing in the Composition Classroom
William “Matt” Haas
Western Oregon University
Teaching freshman composition frustrates many. In ten weeks, the instructor must prepare students of widely varying competencies to survive in a challenging academic environment. At the same time, it offers spectacular satisfaction, as instructors witness student epiphanies and occasionally receive eloquent essays.
But the teaching of writing need not be a roller coaster ride. The instructor can diminish frustration while increasing satisfaction simply by using creative writing techniques to engage and encourage students.
For the purpose of this presentation, we will define creative writing expansively: it is not only poetry and fiction but also any informal writing with few academic constraints.
Such creative writing achieves several goals in the composition classroom. First, it brings concepts and methods to life. For example, students can set and meet writing goals on low-stakes creative activities before moving on to high-stakes assignments. Second, it enriches academic writing by encouraging style, revision, and close attention to detail. Third, it challenges talented writers by unleashing their creativity while engaging weaker writers with assignments on which they can see success.
For this presentation, I will offer a pragmatic justification for using creative writing in the composition classroom. I will also show how to design creative activities and how to integrate them into existing assignment structures. Finally, I will share a number of successful creative activities.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
Writing Naiveté: Forgetting the Past in Spite of the Present
Matthew Schmidgall
Oregon State University
Ideology plays an influential role in the classroom. Though heavily prevalent at every level of education, the oppressive, unyielding thumb of public school administration is much more noticeable in secondary education when a student is just beginning to define himself and his relationship to his environment. In this paper, I explore my experiences with an Oregon school district that left me an exile from the standard curriculum and enrolled in an alternative education program called CHOICES. Though intended for at-risk youth, the pedagogical approach of the program fostered an advanced awareness of community and context absent from my previous experiences in the classroom. In particular, the approach to writing served to develop my voice and sense of self, which allowed me to resist the ideologies classrooms imposed and still jump through the necessary hoops in order to succeed. The lessons I learned in this program have remained with me for years, helping me function more effectively as a student as well as reflect on my current experiences in teaching freshman composition as a graduate student in writing and rhetoric at Oregon State University. This paper will provide teachers of any level a platform for thoughtfully examining the social and academic pressures created in any given classroom environment, and, in the end, an encouragement to break down the barriers that aim to separate a student from his voice.
Re-approaching Students' Discourses of Faith in a Composition Class
Jennifer Love
Lane Community College
My paper is about the productive conflict that can arise at the intersections of differing discourses in a composition class. Specifically, my essay discusses the intersection of students' discourses of faith and the expectation of "secular," conventionally academic discourse that many college writing instructors bring to their teaching.
My essay encourages composition instructors to welcome the disruptions that occur when students of faith bring religious discourses into the classroom and use these rhetorics in their essays. This topic was discussed by Michael-John DePalma in his December 2011 CCC article "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." As DePalma points out, many of our students are evangelical Christians; many students bring the language of their belief into their essays. This was the case with a personal essay written by a student in my fall term 2011 WR 121 class. Uncomfortable with some of the faith-based language in this student's essay, such as "we who are in Christ," I advised the student to remove such language from his essay.
Although the student changed his essay according to my advice in other ways, he chose to keep the faith-based passages, quietly resisting my suggestion and sharpening my awareness that "religion matters to many students" (Hansen 33). My essay will build on DePalma's essay, and on other scholarship on religion and the teaching of composition, by exploring the ways instructors can create environments where religious and non-religious discourses interact productively.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
“We Shouldn’t Have to Read About That”: Television’s Queer Characters and their Implications for Composition Pedagogy
Chris McDonald
Oregon State University
Increasingly, television series aimed at 14-18-year-olds feature queer characters. While the quantity of these images signifies a certain kind of progress in its own right, these images have implications and consequences not only for the ways in which the LGBT community is understood more broadly, but also for the writing classroom. Queer characters – whose presence could richly complicate any series – are often presented as desexualized, sanitized, and “cute,” signifying a “smoothing out” of potential complexity. While many beginning writers try to mask or ignore complexity, this repetitious and systemic “smoothing out” represents a tacit approval of this tendency. These repeated, overly simplistic queer images have lasting consequences for the ways in which students encounter, think, and write about difficult ideas – particularly for arguments with which they don’t agree. In this multimedia presentation, we’ll explore the gay characters of popular television series among high school and college students and discuss the implications of such images for students’ work as writers. As the intersections between television and writing can be wonderfully invigorating in the writing classroom, we’ll also discuss uses of these existing images to inspire, push, and refine critical thinking, as well as how to incorporate these concepts into assignments and in-class exercises.
From Readers to Writers: Analytic Models for Invention in the Composition Classroom
Francesca Gentile
University of Oregon
When we, as writing teachers and composition instructors, assign our students reading, what exactly do we expect them to learn from the particular texts included on our syllabi? Although we might assign an essay or short story for its content or general theme, we typically assign texts that model certain modes of writing. We expect students to observe the writing itself, to interrogate the rhetorical and stylistic moves the author employs. Ultimately, we expect students to convert these observations into strategies which they can employ in their own writing. This conversion, however, does not happen as naturally as we might hope. Encouraging students to see the ways in which they engage analytically with other texts as productive for and applicable to their own writing often requires more of a transition than we expect, and it is with this transition, the shift from reader to writer, that this paper is concerned. Considering models of instruction that encourage students to engage analytically with linguistic and structural components of texts, this paper will explore the ways in which such models can act generatively as sources for invention, directly shaping student writing in ways that more effectively bridge the gap between the student as reader and the student as writer.
Room 204
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
Forging a Link: Freshman Writing & Criminal Justice
Christine Harvey Horning
Western Oregon University
Linked courses—where writing serves as one of the ‘links’—have a long history in university settings; at the institution where I teach, however, that has not been the case. Although not a typical pairing, two years ago I saw an opportunity to create such a link between an Introduction to Criminal Justice course and Freshman writing, and it has been successfully piloted it over two quarters. My presentation will provide an account of how that link came into being (including a discussion of how to recognize a good match between courses), describe the writing assignments that promote cross-disciplinary writing and learning, and analyze classroom pedagogy styles that enhance the content of both courses as well as provide increased comprehension and performance. Consistent with the research on linked courses, our WR-CJ link resulted in additional advantages for students as well, such as higher attendance rates in both courses and a true cohort effect that, as one student put it, “kept me going when I wanted to quit” through the long, uphill battle of the research paper. Despite the technical challenges of enrollment, such links are well-worth pursuing for their mutually enhancing effects, not only on students’ psyches but also on their writing.
“Connecting Global Issues to the Canon of Literature for Authentic Writing and Learning”
Pattie Sloan
West Salem High School
The universal ideas in our canon or literature provide our students access to historical and societal; however, students in the 21st century see these problems far removed from their current experiences and reality. Bridging the gap between the historical/ societal conditions and the current local /global conditions allows our students to appreciate the relevance of their texts. In order to accomplish this, I use the texts of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men and ask the students to engage in authentic writing task, using the texts as a springboard for research into current societal problems. Informative and persuasive writing allows the students to take the themes from the text and make application, through research, to global and local events such as human trafficking and poverty in Oregon. When writing a response to a newspaper editorial, my students attack the thesis of the article, brainstorm their ideas and create a persuasive argument they submit on-line. By allowing students to see the relevancy of the themes in their lives, they have developed an appreciation for our curriculum and the powerful ideas embedded within it.
Session Two: 11:25 – 12:25
Do I Really Have to Go to the Library for this Paper?: Student Research in the Digital Era (Workshop)
Stephen Rust
University of Oregon
This presentation is drawn from my recent experiences teaching composition and cinema studies courses at the University of Oregon. I argue that all first-year college composition courses should include at least one essay assignment that requires students to incorporate library research into their argument. Further, I propose that and at least one class period during the term should be held in the library and conducted by or in conjunction with a research librarian. While this may not sound like a revolutionary idea, here at the state’s flagship research institution it is entirely possible for students to complete two require first-year writing courses without once stepping foot inside our library. In this presentation I will explain how I introduce students to scholarly research practices in my first-year composition courses, coordinate classroom instruction with library staff and the writing center, and assess student writing. In the digital age, students need direct instruction in library research in order to avoid the pitfalls in their writing and thinking that inevitably result having all of their sources handed to them by instructors or from conducting research exclusively through Google and Wikipedia.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
The corner of Buzz and Burke: the rhetoric of science writing
Amanda Pampuro
Portland State University
Over the past century, humanity has moved from charting visible stars to exploring beyond them, from fearing diseases to solving their protein structures, and from scavenging for food to designing it. The knowledge and technology arising from scientific research can no longer remain isolated within its discipline. How science is presented, or failed to be presented, outside of itself has real world consequences in the acceptance or denial of ideas and the implementation or banishment of policy. Writing, although traditionally tasked to the humanities, now has a vital intersection with science.
Along with an increasing amount of scientific information being generated, comes questions of how to present scientific research to the public in a way that is ethical, but also carries the gravity of an issue. Notions from evolution to climate change, though deemed “good science,” have encountered mixed reactions from the public. On one hand, cancer research seems to get unanimous support and on the other space exploration is viewed as expensive and wasteful. Setting out with the notion that there is a correlation between appropriate rhetoric and the public’s acceptance of a scientific idea, this paper will further analyze what rhetorical moves make for affective science writing and offer improvements for the continuation of this interdisciplinary discourse.
Writing at the Intersection of War and Peace: What Every Writing Instructor Should Know About Veterans with War Injuries
Maureen Phillips
Western Oregon University
If President Obama's stated goal for troop withdrawal is realized, nearly 100,000 American troops will return from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder are considered the "signature wounds" of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, and the rate of suicide is higher than it has ever been for returning veterans. Because of the present unemployment crisis and the availability of GI Bill tuition funding, many veterans are entering college and university study to begin a transition to a civilian career. As a retired military veteran and survivor of military PTSD, Maureen Phillips will discuss the implications of psycho-social and cognitive behaviors associated with these "invisible wounds" among war veterans in the writing classroom. This presentation will include a description of symptoms and warning signs, the cognitive implications for students learning to write in a university setting, and strategies for reaching injured veterans in meaningful and secure ways.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
The Intersection of Student and Source Materials: Better Paraphrasing through Linguistics
Robert Troyer
Western Oregon University
Paraphrasing and incorporating direct quotations are the means through which writers in many genres who work in a wide variety of professional fields incorporate ‘outside information’ into their prose. Though integrating apt quotations into a text is a nuanced skill that students should study and practice, most novice writers at the secondary and post-secondary levels (English Language Learners and native speakers included) find paraphrasing to be the more challenging technique. Furthermore, of these two methods, paraphrasing is used far more frequently in published academic writing. The writing instructor’s task of teaching students to skillfully paraphrase is hardly made easier by the majority of writing handbooks that offer little more than vague injunctions to “put the source text into your own words.” Aside from the theoretical quandary raised by the phrase “your own words,” such advice provides little explanatory guidance to students who are expected to compare example paraphrases to original texts, intuit the kinds of changes performed, and somehow replicate the procedures in their own compositions. In this practitioner-based presentation, basic grammatical structure and semantic descriptions will be applied to successful paraphrases in an accessible way in order to understand their transformations of structure and meaning. This linguistic understanding will then be applied to the classroom in order to create a list of techniques that instructors can use to teach students how to paraphrase appropriately and confidently.
Owning It: Information Literacy, Autonomy, and the First-Year Writing Classroom
Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski
Daemon College
At many institutions, a central aim of First-Year Composition course work is to help students develop the competence, dexterity, and autonomy required to successfully navigate the demands of 21st century research. In Composition classrooms, however, the goal of developing capable student researchers is often reduced to teaching a set of prescribed skills that emphasize adherence to approved style guides, specific research databases, and clearly delineated mechanics of citation. While such approaches provide students with the tools required to use and document sources in introductory academic projects, this paper argues they also undermine efforts to foster students’ versatility and autonomy as writers working in information-rich environments. Drawing from current research on student information literacy practices and professional guidelines on information literacy instruction, this presentation will propose a framework for First-Year Composition envisioning information behavior as a series of rhetorical choices, and will recommend classroom activities designed to foster greater student ownership of information practices throughout the writing process.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Writing at Intersections: Chinese International Students and the Necessity of Enculturation into Academic Argument
Maureen Phillips and Lise Hull
Western Oregon University, Oregon State University
International student recruitment is growing exponentially and is regarded as a vast source of revenue for colleges and universities across the United States facing budget deficits. At Oregon State University, the INTO/OSU program, which has tripled in size during each of the three years it has existed, recruits several hundred Chinese students each year who are eager to enter OSU's highly-regarded engineering and business graduate programs and undergraduate degree programs. To gain entry, students must complete a three-term "pathway", or bridge program, designed to prepare them with enough English fluency to succeed in their coursework. All of the Chinese students arrive having studied English as a foreign language since childhood. However, it is not until they begin their first academic writing course (Writing 121) that they realize more than basic fluency is necessary to succeed. Apart from conversational fluency, they need "academic enculturation". Indeed, because the focus of instruction is the practice of academic argument, instructors quickly realize that they must first clarify the context in which academic argument is asked of their students, which necessitates a crash course in the democratic process and the means by which scholarship is motivated, created and perpetuated in western culture. This intersection of academic cultures in the INTO/OSU writing classroom, and the methods used to bridge cultures, will be the focus of the speakers' presentations.
Room 301
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
What’s Weird Unites Us (Workshop)
Tandy Tillinghast-Voit
Chemeketa Community College
How can surreal detail aid writers at all levels in shaping story and essay? How might the bizarre or grotesque be an invitation for grappling with complexity or difficulty? A Puritan legacy informs American culture; this tradition teaches us to cover our eyes from sex and horror, even as sensual and violent images mount in our media. In contrast to these Puritan notions, in many contemporary essays or stories the details become raw, graphic, forcing readers to re-see what we may avert our eyes from initially. Such surreal details then may provide a more compassionate way to explore fear than our real-life attempts at fight or flight. Bring your imagination, strange life-experiences and writing utensil. In the Oregon Writing Project model we will write, share, then exchange teaching tools.
Freewriting, bizarre topics, and other non-traditional tools in composition classes bridge resistance. Cultivate the peculiar within your classroom. Model writings and students products will be shared. Examine how unique perception and experience unify writers and students.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
“School’s Not for Anybody”: Migration as a Sponsor of Literacy in the U.S.-Mexico Context
Susan Meyers
Oregon State University
The teaching of writing has become increasingly involved in educational intersections at the transnational level. For instance, recent policy debates from Arizona’s recent HB 2281 to the still pending Dream Act reflect the complexity of current U.S. concerns about education and immigration. In the U.S.-Mexico context, migration is often considered to be a detrimental influence on young people’s pursuit of education. When migration is considered to be a positive influence, focus rests on the ways that increased financial resources can create more access to formal education in the migrants’ home community. Indeed, physical access to schools tends to be the focus of many initiatives to improve educational experiences in developing nations, or among groups of minority students within the U.S. Beyond these considerations of economics and access, however, the potentially positive social impacts of migration are rarely considered. Drawing on a year of field data in rural, migrant-sending Mexico and a receiving community in the U.S., this presentation argues that migration actually facilitates, rather than jeopardizes, educational gains in both Mexico and the U.S. In particular, social capital garnered through the migration experience and transferred in the form of social remittances, as opposed to purely financial remittances, can have a particularly strong impact on literacy. Further, the ideological impact that these social remittances can have on migrating populations may in some cases have a more powerful effect than does physical access to schools. In addition to offering an outline of these research findings, this presentation will suggest relevant implications and practical solutions for teachers of writing in U.S. high schools and colleges.
“The Politics of Playing Together Nicely: An Exploration of the (Dis)connection Between Pedagogy, Literacy, and Assessment”
Michael Hilbert and Thomas Pickering
Washington State University
Working from Brian Huot’s claim that “meaningful assessment design requires that the assessment be site-based, locally controlled, context sensitive, and rhetorically based,” and, additionally, placement and assessment practices “should be consistent with current research and theories on language learning and literacy,” our presentation will attempt to contextualize and examine the ways placement and assessment practices within composition programs intersect with current literacy theories, and common pedagogical practices (Huot, et al. 10).
Ideally, placement and pedagogical theory would mutually inform each other, and the criteria for placement exams would match the criteria used to assess freshman composition papers within any one university. However, oftentimes this is not case; economic and material concerns—increasing enrollment, for example—impede clear dialogue between assessment, literacy, and pedagogy. Our paper explores the disconnect between popular placement methods and pedagogical theory and practice. We argue that various economical, institutional, material, and discursive factors constrain the relationship between pedagogy and placement. To negotiate these constraints, we suggest that placement administrators and composition scholars pursue pedagogical theories that account for, rather than ignore, the social and material realities of a particular university within that institution’s local context.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Assessing Assessment: Testing to Teach What We Want to Teach (Workshop)
M. Elizabeth (Betsy) Sargent
University of Alberta
Given the increasing pressure for quantitative assessment and accountability in higher education, those of us developing writing programs need to articulate what it is we do in our courses. Since all assessment teaches (and often unintentionally teaches things we don’t want to teach), we need to develop ethical assessment tools that support our curricula and that also allow us to share with stakeholders (deans, parents, legislators) numbers we can stand behind.
At the University of Alberta, we’ve been using a 50-question Writing Strategies Inventory (WSI) for program assessment of our new first-year course, Writing Studies 101 (based on a writing-about-writing approach): we want to know what the course is doing well and not so well. I first developed the WSI in Oregon in the 1990’s, but extensively revised it to better support our course objectives (including the conceptual model of writing expertise developed by Anne Beaufort); a rich database has been created to help us collect, query, and analyze the resulting data (2007-2012). 100% of WRS 101 students complete the WSI online during the first week of classes (as part of the instruction in the course) and once again at end of term, receiving (as an aid to reflective practice in composing their portfolio cover letters) three individual graphs representing any changes throughout the term in their writing behaviours or their attitudes toward and understandings of the writing process.
Students are also asked to select and write about several of their paired responses that particularly intrigue them. The WSI thus helps students and instructors focus on building together a richer and more useful conception of writing expertise that will transfer to each student’s subsequent courses and writing tasks. The WSI can also widen our understanding of valid and reliable ways to assess writing programs and offers a critique of/ alternative to many current forms of writing program assessment.
Room 305:
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
How to Use Bulletin Boards with Online or Online-Hybrid Classes to Build Learning Communities (Workshop)
Maren Anderson
Western Oregon University
One criticism of online learning is that students can feel alienated because they need face-to-face time to connect with the teachers and/or subject matter.
I would argue this need not be so. Today’s college-aged students have grown up gleefully debating and fostering friendships on social media sites with people whom they may never meet.
The challenge for educators is to use the online format to our advantage when designing our lessons. Fundamental to this approach are effective discussion questions on bulletin boards.
Most Learning Management Systems—including Moodle, BlackBoard and WebCT—are equipped with bulletin board systems. The trick for instructors is constructing and posting questions which foster actual discussion, ideally encouraging students to work together to solve problems by building on each other’s answers.
This workshop will model this kind of online discussion, and attendees will leave with tools to help them design community-building forums for their classes.
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
Writing Bridges Over the Seas: Connecting Rhetoric and Practice in an International Writing Center
Christine Murray
University of Colorado – Denver, International College at Beijing
In the international writing center, the ESL-student of L2 writing and the L1 tutor who reads it form lasting connections grounded in Contrastive Rhetoric (CR): considerations of writing as linguistic, cross-cultural, educational (Connor, Kaplan). As many have shown, CR has its limits, even if it’s also a worthwhile ideal. Matsuda identifies static assumptions underlying CR--mainly that it overlooks how dynamic and multi-faceted are the lasting connections between writer and reader. Further elaborating these assumptions, Kuboda and Lehhner (2004) call for a reconsideration of CR’s aims, outlining a “Critical Contrastive Rhetoric.” Yet both overlook an a priori assumption that is, arguably, also rather static: Sapir-Whorf assumes one’s first language always grounds one’s perception. Yet, just how stable is this notion in hands-on, L2 writing?
From the perspective of f-2-f international writing center work, my paper will revisit and explore this theoretically “ bumpy road.” I ask, what is useful for international writing centers in this paradoxical, instructional triad of groundings and assumptions? Specifically, in what ways does Sapir-Whorf seem static? In what ways might it work as an advantage? Primarily, I explore how student writers learn contrastively to use as their L1 advantageously, rather than as the “interference” assumed by CR (Kubota and Lehner). My paper applies these questions to two case studies of Chinese students revising L2 college essays and writing journals focused to what they are learning about ESL. In all, I will consider some possible “bridges” that international writing centers can “build,” moving forward for writers.
Historical Intersections: A Writing Center Case Study
Crystal Mueller
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
As a new writing center director takes the wheel, she or he often inherits a writing center; the director and center often share little history. The director’s and center’s histories intersect in ways that require both to adapt and to use as an advantage that all is in a constant state of change. The inherited center has arisen within an institutional context with specific administrative and political circumstances. It bears an institutional reputation. It carries its own policies and traditions that can be altered but that are, nonetheless, established. It has an established location. It has a staff. The writing center director, too, has a history, a specific path that has prepared her or him for the teaching, research, and service required to successfully direct a writing center. The successful writing center director quickly adapts, finding ways to steer along the open road of endless possibilities ahead while navigating the ruts of institutional history and practice.
This presentation offers a case study of the triumphs and challenges of steering through such intersections, amid tenuous staff turnover, burgeoning needs for writing curriculum support for students and faculty stemming from general education reform, concerns over retention in difficult budget years, etc. The presentation, supported with research in writing center administration, describes the ways the writing center director continues to work to grow a writing center with greater institutional relevance and enhanced campus partnerships. It claims that a healthy writing center must pave its own way.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
No Discourse Community is an Island: Discursive Intersections in FYC, Writing Centers, and Service Learning (Panel)
Alison Cardinal, Anthony Warnke, Zach Beare
University of Washington – Tacoma, Seattle University, University of Washington – Tacoma
Genre scholar Charles Bazerman explains that a discourse community "identifies a grouping of people who share common language norms, characteristics, patterns, or practices as a consequence of their ongoing communications .” While Bazerman’s definition emphasizes the discourse community as an isolated unit, the intersections of discourse communities define them as much as their isolation. This panel will explore the many ways that discourse communities intersect and how an ongoing examination of those intersections can better inform writing pedagogies. Alison Cardinal will present her findings of her ongoing studies of teaching students about discourse communities in an effort to make students’ skills gained in FYC more transferable. By teaching students how to identify discourse communities and learn the rules of the genres that operate within those discourse communities, Alison has discovered that students are better able to write across the disciplines. Zach Beare will discuss his recent work examining writing centers as sites of discursive and disciplinary intersections and (sometimes violent) collisions. Zach will examine the precarious position writing center personnel find themselves in as individuals faced with expectations of expertise at the same time that they routinely work with students from disciplines very alien to their own. Though the dissonance in discourse community backgrounds can often lead to tensions between the writer and writing tutor, Zach will discuss the potential for writer empowerment and cultivation of discourse community metaknowledge. Anthony Warnke will discuss the role of intersecting and conflicting discourse communities in FYC service-learning experiences. Anthony will explore the rhetoric of Seattle University students in their blog posts and argumentative essays about tutoring in economically disadvantaged schools. He will analyze how many presumptions SU students make about their students' abilities and cultures derive from unintentionally universalizing the uses of language, behavior, and ideology of their own discourse communities. Anthony will demonstrate how the use of linguist James Paul Gee's ideas of discourse can help students see their own values as contingent on their discourse communities. A roundtable discussion will follow the presentations.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
“Desperately Seeking Conversation: Collaboration, Community, and the Common Core” (Panel)
Vicki Tolar Burton, Nancy Knowles, Jean Knight, Caroline LeGuin, and Eva Payne
Oregon State University, Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, Portland Community College – Sylvania, Chemeketa Community College
COWT (congenial Oregon community college and university writing teachers) seek meaningful conversation with high school colleagues. Let’s explore the impact of the Common Core K-20. We are alignment- and assessment-curious. Willing to experiment. The goals of this workshop are to exchange insider knowledge, share resources, form alliances, and develop LTR among colleagues.
*(Sponsored by OWEAC, the Oregon Writing and English Advisory Committee: Since 1974 supporting Oregon teachers of writing from high school through university)
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Write-of-Way or Write-of-Passage? Empowering Writers at the Secondary/Postsecondary Intersection (Panel)
Donna Evans, Nancy Knowles, Heidi Harris, Jacob Harris, and Elizabeth Becker
Eastern Oregon University
One of the strengths of American higher education is access. Anyone with the money (or loans) and initiative can embark on a college education. Access, however, poses problems associated with preparation, as secondary teachers labor to ensure student readiness and college teachers attempt to meet incoming students’ needs. In Oregon, the stakes for all concerned escalate with the 40-40-20 goal calling for more students to achieve greater educational success in less time. This goal perpetuates the focus in American education on the end result, in this case the degree, rather than the learning occurring en route. This focus results, for example, in haphazard dual-enrollment programs that fail students when they award credits without the teacher dialogue and classroom learning necessary to ensure students can meet course objectives.
In response to this push for speed, secondary and postsecondary writing teachers need to build alliances to pave a “write-of-way” that ensures high-school graduates have acquired skills necessary for college-level writing and that college-level skills are accurately transcripted. In creating an effective “write-of-way,” these alliances must explore first-year college writing as a “write-of-passage,” a true cognitive leap from high-school to college-level work but also an emotional shift in identity from learner to self-directed scholar. This panel will explore the “write-of-passage” occurring in first-year writing classrooms at Eastern Oregon University, particularly the supports necessary to ensure success for underprepared students, as a means of reconsidering the “write-of-way” between high school and college writing classrooms.
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
Updating our Status as Writing Teachers: Using Students' Online-Writing Skills in the Composition Classroom
Alicia Rosman
Oregon State University
What kinds of writing are our freshmen composition students doing outside the classroom? And, perhaps more importantly, how do we use the skills they’re using to teach writing? From updating their statuses on social network sites like Facebook to keeping blogs rather than journals, today’s students are more tech savvy than ever before and are members of a generation whose literacy narrative is more and more interwoven with technology. As writing teachers, it is our responsibility to be aware of this technology and to find ways to utilize it in our classrooms.
This presentation will offer an overview of popular online writing mediums and how students are using them outside the classroom. Specifically, it will focus in on how writing teachers can both integrate this technology in the classroom as well as appeal to the skill-sets associated with using them. I will offer specific tools to use in the classroom as well as cite foundational texts and studies on the current conversation surrounding this field.
“Teaching Writing in the Twenty-First Century”
Daniel Randlemon
Oregon State University
One of the most important and most challenging intersections facing teachers of writing today is the notion of twenty-first century literacies. What exactly is meant by terms like “twenty-first century literacies,” “multimodal literacies,” and “new media texts”? This question has emerged as an important and timely intersection in the teaching of composition. Many teachers of writing have been trained to teach traditional print literacies; however, over the past two decades, teachers and scholars have begun to wonder about the ways that the Internet and new technologies affect modes of composition, and also how new literacies that have sprung up out of these technological advances can be implemented into the writing classroom.
This presentation is designed to introduce teachers of writing to some of the most significant opportunities, insights, and challenges that scholars and teachers have identified regarding writing in the twenty-first century, as well as some how gaining a better understanding of such a topic can benefit the everyday teacher of writing. Those who attend this presentation will leave with a clearer understanding of how to navigate the intersection of traditional print literacies and twenty-first century literacies. Throughout the course of the presentation, I will offer an overview of twenty-first century literacies, introduce attendees to some specific resources like the MacArthur Foundations site for Digital Media and Learning, and propose straightforward assignment ideas for implementing twenty-first century literacies into every writing classroom.
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
“Fresh Eyes on Freshman Composition: Energizing the classroom through techniques that let students ‘be writers’”
April Carothers
Western Oregon University
In 1990, Robert J. Connors described freshman composition instructors as a “…permanent underclass … oppressed, badly paid, ill-used, and secretly despised.” Depressing words that are possibly more true today than ever before. More and more colleges and universities are hiring part time, temporary instructors where once there were permanent positions, even tenure-track positions. Those of us who feel called to teach composition find ourselves hitting the glass ceiling with force.
Add the fact that freshman composition has always been a particularly difficult course to teach, one that most students are required to take in order to achieve any degree. Working conditions combine with student reluctance to create an environment that anyone would find discouraging, with no relief currently in sight. Connors called for major changes in the way the course is administered, yet it is certain that nothing will change before next term starts. We have gone into survival mode.
This paper examines how to motivate ourselves by considering the long standing question of what freshman composition is for. The simple answer—“to teach them to write correctly”—is not enough. What students need has been demonstrated in recent research: a sense of exchange between themselves and their teachers, who represent the college environment. The freshman composition classroom must become a workshop where students experience what it means to be read, heard, and responded to… not a gateway course but a bridge, creating connections that energize teachers and guide students toward what it means to be a college level writer.
Collective knowledge in the composition classroom
Katherine Ristau
Western Oregon University
The term begins so easily. Our students are excited about peer reviewing; they are interested to hear what their peers have to say and how they can refine their own writing. As the term progresses, the excitement wanes. Sure, they are doing the work, but are they applying it to their own essays? When the final peer review arrives, the students are clearly mailing it in – filling in the blanks but not thinking outside of the box. As composition teachers, we try to fight this apathy with a range of different strategies. But how can we move our students beyond the siren’s call of the peer review instructions? How can we compel them to critically consider their peer’s arguments? This paper suggests we approach the final peer review with an emphasis on the collective knowledge of the classroom, offering an activity to get our students engaged and responsive to their peer’s work. Ultimately, the reflexive activity will encourage our students to view their peer’s work from a fresh angle, and motivate them to apply what they have learned to their own written work.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
Writing Matters: Discovering the Intersections Between Creative Writing and Composition Pedagogies, Or: Ways In Which It’s All the Same
Andrea Ardans
Oregon State University
Wendy Bishop, creative writer and composition scholar, writes, “I can no more imagine being a writing teacher who does not write than I can imagine being one who does not read…I teach writing precisely because I love these two intimately connected activities.” As a creative writer who teaches composition, I identify with Bishop, and am fascinated by the ways in which the pedagogies of creative writing and composition intersect. In this presentation, I explore the commonalities of these two seemingly disparate writing practices and their pedagogies in order to illuminate the ways in which these pedagogies can inform and enhance one another, rather than continue to exist on separate planes within our minds and classrooms. Bishop advocates for others “to become part of a company of writer-scholar-teachers who aim to make their practices more pleasurable,” and this presentation does the same, by exploring why it’s important for us to stop separating our writer-selves from our teacher-selves. Rather than arguing a particular claim, this presentation utilizes personal reflection and scholarly work to explore pedagogical intersections and generate practical ways to integrate these intersections in both the creative writing and composition classrooms.
The Intersection Between Creative and Academic Writing in the Composition Classroom
William “Matt” Haas
Western Oregon University
Teaching freshman composition frustrates many. In ten weeks, the instructor must prepare students of widely varying competencies to survive in a challenging academic environment. At the same time, it offers spectacular satisfaction, as instructors witness student epiphanies and occasionally receive eloquent essays.
But the teaching of writing need not be a roller coaster ride. The instructor can diminish frustration while increasing satisfaction simply by using creative writing techniques to engage and encourage students.
For the purpose of this presentation, we will define creative writing expansively: it is not only poetry and fiction but also any informal writing with few academic constraints.
Such creative writing achieves several goals in the composition classroom. First, it brings concepts and methods to life. For example, students can set and meet writing goals on low-stakes creative activities before moving on to high-stakes assignments. Second, it enriches academic writing by encouraging style, revision, and close attention to detail. Third, it challenges talented writers by unleashing their creativity while engaging weaker writers with assignments on which they can see success.
For this presentation, I will offer a pragmatic justification for using creative writing in the composition classroom. I will also show how to design creative activities and how to integrate them into existing assignment structures. Finally, I will share a number of successful creative activities.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
Writing Naiveté: Forgetting the Past in Spite of the Present
Matthew Schmidgall
Oregon State University
Ideology plays an influential role in the classroom. Though heavily prevalent at every level of education, the oppressive, unyielding thumb of public school administration is much more noticeable in secondary education when a student is just beginning to define himself and his relationship to his environment. In this paper, I explore my experiences with an Oregon school district that left me an exile from the standard curriculum and enrolled in an alternative education program called CHOICES. Though intended for at-risk youth, the pedagogical approach of the program fostered an advanced awareness of community and context absent from my previous experiences in the classroom. In particular, the approach to writing served to develop my voice and sense of self, which allowed me to resist the ideologies classrooms imposed and still jump through the necessary hoops in order to succeed. The lessons I learned in this program have remained with me for years, helping me function more effectively as a student as well as reflect on my current experiences in teaching freshman composition as a graduate student in writing and rhetoric at Oregon State University. This paper will provide teachers of any level a platform for thoughtfully examining the social and academic pressures created in any given classroom environment, and, in the end, an encouragement to break down the barriers that aim to separate a student from his voice.
Re-approaching Students' Discourses of Faith in a Composition Class
Jennifer Love
Lane Community College
My paper is about the productive conflict that can arise at the intersections of differing discourses in a composition class. Specifically, my essay discusses the intersection of students' discourses of faith and the expectation of "secular," conventionally academic discourse that many college writing instructors bring to their teaching.
My essay encourages composition instructors to welcome the disruptions that occur when students of faith bring religious discourses into the classroom and use these rhetorics in their essays. This topic was discussed by Michael-John DePalma in his December 2011 CCC article "Re-envisioning Religious Discourses as Rhetorical Resources in Composition Teaching: A Pragmatic Response to the Challenge of Belief." As DePalma points out, many of our students are evangelical Christians; many students bring the language of their belief into their essays. This was the case with a personal essay written by a student in my fall term 2011 WR 121 class. Uncomfortable with some of the faith-based language in this student's essay, such as "we who are in Christ," I advised the student to remove such language from his essay.
Although the student changed his essay according to my advice in other ways, he chose to keep the faith-based passages, quietly resisting my suggestion and sharpening my awareness that "religion matters to many students" (Hansen 33). My essay will build on DePalma's essay, and on other scholarship on religion and the teaching of composition, by exploring the ways instructors can create environments where religious and non-religious discourses interact productively.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
“We Shouldn’t Have to Read About That”: Television’s Queer Characters and their Implications for Composition Pedagogy
Chris McDonald
Oregon State University
Increasingly, television series aimed at 14-18-year-olds feature queer characters. While the quantity of these images signifies a certain kind of progress in its own right, these images have implications and consequences not only for the ways in which the LGBT community is understood more broadly, but also for the writing classroom. Queer characters – whose presence could richly complicate any series – are often presented as desexualized, sanitized, and “cute,” signifying a “smoothing out” of potential complexity. While many beginning writers try to mask or ignore complexity, this repetitious and systemic “smoothing out” represents a tacit approval of this tendency. These repeated, overly simplistic queer images have lasting consequences for the ways in which students encounter, think, and write about difficult ideas – particularly for arguments with which they don’t agree. In this multimedia presentation, we’ll explore the gay characters of popular television series among high school and college students and discuss the implications of such images for students’ work as writers. As the intersections between television and writing can be wonderfully invigorating in the writing classroom, we’ll also discuss uses of these existing images to inspire, push, and refine critical thinking, as well as how to incorporate these concepts into assignments and in-class exercises.
From Readers to Writers: Analytic Models for Invention in the Composition Classroom
Francesca Gentile
University of Oregon
When we, as writing teachers and composition instructors, assign our students reading, what exactly do we expect them to learn from the particular texts included on our syllabi? Although we might assign an essay or short story for its content or general theme, we typically assign texts that model certain modes of writing. We expect students to observe the writing itself, to interrogate the rhetorical and stylistic moves the author employs. Ultimately, we expect students to convert these observations into strategies which they can employ in their own writing. This conversion, however, does not happen as naturally as we might hope. Encouraging students to see the ways in which they engage analytically with other texts as productive for and applicable to their own writing often requires more of a transition than we expect, and it is with this transition, the shift from reader to writer, that this paper is concerned. Considering models of instruction that encourage students to engage analytically with linguistic and structural components of texts, this paper will explore the ways in which such models can act generatively as sources for invention, directly shaping student writing in ways that more effectively bridge the gap between the student as reader and the student as writer.
Room 204
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
Forging a Link: Freshman Writing & Criminal Justice
Christine Harvey Horning
Western Oregon University
Linked courses—where writing serves as one of the ‘links’—have a long history in university settings; at the institution where I teach, however, that has not been the case. Although not a typical pairing, two years ago I saw an opportunity to create such a link between an Introduction to Criminal Justice course and Freshman writing, and it has been successfully piloted it over two quarters. My presentation will provide an account of how that link came into being (including a discussion of how to recognize a good match between courses), describe the writing assignments that promote cross-disciplinary writing and learning, and analyze classroom pedagogy styles that enhance the content of both courses as well as provide increased comprehension and performance. Consistent with the research on linked courses, our WR-CJ link resulted in additional advantages for students as well, such as higher attendance rates in both courses and a true cohort effect that, as one student put it, “kept me going when I wanted to quit” through the long, uphill battle of the research paper. Despite the technical challenges of enrollment, such links are well-worth pursuing for their mutually enhancing effects, not only on students’ psyches but also on their writing.
“Connecting Global Issues to the Canon of Literature for Authentic Writing and Learning”
Pattie Sloan
West Salem High School
The universal ideas in our canon or literature provide our students access to historical and societal; however, students in the 21st century see these problems far removed from their current experiences and reality. Bridging the gap between the historical/ societal conditions and the current local /global conditions allows our students to appreciate the relevance of their texts. In order to accomplish this, I use the texts of Huckleberry Finn, The Great Gatsby and Of Mice and Men and ask the students to engage in authentic writing task, using the texts as a springboard for research into current societal problems. Informative and persuasive writing allows the students to take the themes from the text and make application, through research, to global and local events such as human trafficking and poverty in Oregon. When writing a response to a newspaper editorial, my students attack the thesis of the article, brainstorm their ideas and create a persuasive argument they submit on-line. By allowing students to see the relevancy of the themes in their lives, they have developed an appreciation for our curriculum and the powerful ideas embedded within it.
Session Two: 11:25 – 12:25
Do I Really Have to Go to the Library for this Paper?: Student Research in the Digital Era (Workshop)
Stephen Rust
University of Oregon
This presentation is drawn from my recent experiences teaching composition and cinema studies courses at the University of Oregon. I argue that all first-year college composition courses should include at least one essay assignment that requires students to incorporate library research into their argument. Further, I propose that and at least one class period during the term should be held in the library and conducted by or in conjunction with a research librarian. While this may not sound like a revolutionary idea, here at the state’s flagship research institution it is entirely possible for students to complete two require first-year writing courses without once stepping foot inside our library. In this presentation I will explain how I introduce students to scholarly research practices in my first-year composition courses, coordinate classroom instruction with library staff and the writing center, and assess student writing. In the digital age, students need direct instruction in library research in order to avoid the pitfalls in their writing and thinking that inevitably result having all of their sources handed to them by instructors or from conducting research exclusively through Google and Wikipedia.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
The corner of Buzz and Burke: the rhetoric of science writing
Amanda Pampuro
Portland State University
Over the past century, humanity has moved from charting visible stars to exploring beyond them, from fearing diseases to solving their protein structures, and from scavenging for food to designing it. The knowledge and technology arising from scientific research can no longer remain isolated within its discipline. How science is presented, or failed to be presented, outside of itself has real world consequences in the acceptance or denial of ideas and the implementation or banishment of policy. Writing, although traditionally tasked to the humanities, now has a vital intersection with science.
Along with an increasing amount of scientific information being generated, comes questions of how to present scientific research to the public in a way that is ethical, but also carries the gravity of an issue. Notions from evolution to climate change, though deemed “good science,” have encountered mixed reactions from the public. On one hand, cancer research seems to get unanimous support and on the other space exploration is viewed as expensive and wasteful. Setting out with the notion that there is a correlation between appropriate rhetoric and the public’s acceptance of a scientific idea, this paper will further analyze what rhetorical moves make for affective science writing and offer improvements for the continuation of this interdisciplinary discourse.
Writing at the Intersection of War and Peace: What Every Writing Instructor Should Know About Veterans with War Injuries
Maureen Phillips
Western Oregon University
If President Obama's stated goal for troop withdrawal is realized, nearly 100,000 American troops will return from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan by the end of 2014. Traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder are considered the "signature wounds" of the Iraqi and Afghan wars, and the rate of suicide is higher than it has ever been for returning veterans. Because of the present unemployment crisis and the availability of GI Bill tuition funding, many veterans are entering college and university study to begin a transition to a civilian career. As a retired military veteran and survivor of military PTSD, Maureen Phillips will discuss the implications of psycho-social and cognitive behaviors associated with these "invisible wounds" among war veterans in the writing classroom. This presentation will include a description of symptoms and warning signs, the cognitive implications for students learning to write in a university setting, and strategies for reaching injured veterans in meaningful and secure ways.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
The Intersection of Student and Source Materials: Better Paraphrasing through Linguistics
Robert Troyer
Western Oregon University
Paraphrasing and incorporating direct quotations are the means through which writers in many genres who work in a wide variety of professional fields incorporate ‘outside information’ into their prose. Though integrating apt quotations into a text is a nuanced skill that students should study and practice, most novice writers at the secondary and post-secondary levels (English Language Learners and native speakers included) find paraphrasing to be the more challenging technique. Furthermore, of these two methods, paraphrasing is used far more frequently in published academic writing. The writing instructor’s task of teaching students to skillfully paraphrase is hardly made easier by the majority of writing handbooks that offer little more than vague injunctions to “put the source text into your own words.” Aside from the theoretical quandary raised by the phrase “your own words,” such advice provides little explanatory guidance to students who are expected to compare example paraphrases to original texts, intuit the kinds of changes performed, and somehow replicate the procedures in their own compositions. In this practitioner-based presentation, basic grammatical structure and semantic descriptions will be applied to successful paraphrases in an accessible way in order to understand their transformations of structure and meaning. This linguistic understanding will then be applied to the classroom in order to create a list of techniques that instructors can use to teach students how to paraphrase appropriately and confidently.
Owning It: Information Literacy, Autonomy, and the First-Year Writing Classroom
Erica Frisicaro-Pawlowski
Daemon College
At many institutions, a central aim of First-Year Composition course work is to help students develop the competence, dexterity, and autonomy required to successfully navigate the demands of 21st century research. In Composition classrooms, however, the goal of developing capable student researchers is often reduced to teaching a set of prescribed skills that emphasize adherence to approved style guides, specific research databases, and clearly delineated mechanics of citation. While such approaches provide students with the tools required to use and document sources in introductory academic projects, this paper argues they also undermine efforts to foster students’ versatility and autonomy as writers working in information-rich environments. Drawing from current research on student information literacy practices and professional guidelines on information literacy instruction, this presentation will propose a framework for First-Year Composition envisioning information behavior as a series of rhetorical choices, and will recommend classroom activities designed to foster greater student ownership of information practices throughout the writing process.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Writing at Intersections: Chinese International Students and the Necessity of Enculturation into Academic Argument
Maureen Phillips and Lise Hull
Western Oregon University, Oregon State University
International student recruitment is growing exponentially and is regarded as a vast source of revenue for colleges and universities across the United States facing budget deficits. At Oregon State University, the INTO/OSU program, which has tripled in size during each of the three years it has existed, recruits several hundred Chinese students each year who are eager to enter OSU's highly-regarded engineering and business graduate programs and undergraduate degree programs. To gain entry, students must complete a three-term "pathway", or bridge program, designed to prepare them with enough English fluency to succeed in their coursework. All of the Chinese students arrive having studied English as a foreign language since childhood. However, it is not until they begin their first academic writing course (Writing 121) that they realize more than basic fluency is necessary to succeed. Apart from conversational fluency, they need "academic enculturation". Indeed, because the focus of instruction is the practice of academic argument, instructors quickly realize that they must first clarify the context in which academic argument is asked of their students, which necessitates a crash course in the democratic process and the means by which scholarship is motivated, created and perpetuated in western culture. This intersection of academic cultures in the INTO/OSU writing classroom, and the methods used to bridge cultures, will be the focus of the speakers' presentations.
Room 301
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
What’s Weird Unites Us (Workshop)
Tandy Tillinghast-Voit
Chemeketa Community College
How can surreal detail aid writers at all levels in shaping story and essay? How might the bizarre or grotesque be an invitation for grappling with complexity or difficulty? A Puritan legacy informs American culture; this tradition teaches us to cover our eyes from sex and horror, even as sensual and violent images mount in our media. In contrast to these Puritan notions, in many contemporary essays or stories the details become raw, graphic, forcing readers to re-see what we may avert our eyes from initially. Such surreal details then may provide a more compassionate way to explore fear than our real-life attempts at fight or flight. Bring your imagination, strange life-experiences and writing utensil. In the Oregon Writing Project model we will write, share, then exchange teaching tools.
Freewriting, bizarre topics, and other non-traditional tools in composition classes bridge resistance. Cultivate the peculiar within your classroom. Model writings and students products will be shared. Examine how unique perception and experience unify writers and students.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
“School’s Not for Anybody”: Migration as a Sponsor of Literacy in the U.S.-Mexico Context
Susan Meyers
Oregon State University
The teaching of writing has become increasingly involved in educational intersections at the transnational level. For instance, recent policy debates from Arizona’s recent HB 2281 to the still pending Dream Act reflect the complexity of current U.S. concerns about education and immigration. In the U.S.-Mexico context, migration is often considered to be a detrimental influence on young people’s pursuit of education. When migration is considered to be a positive influence, focus rests on the ways that increased financial resources can create more access to formal education in the migrants’ home community. Indeed, physical access to schools tends to be the focus of many initiatives to improve educational experiences in developing nations, or among groups of minority students within the U.S. Beyond these considerations of economics and access, however, the potentially positive social impacts of migration are rarely considered. Drawing on a year of field data in rural, migrant-sending Mexico and a receiving community in the U.S., this presentation argues that migration actually facilitates, rather than jeopardizes, educational gains in both Mexico and the U.S. In particular, social capital garnered through the migration experience and transferred in the form of social remittances, as opposed to purely financial remittances, can have a particularly strong impact on literacy. Further, the ideological impact that these social remittances can have on migrating populations may in some cases have a more powerful effect than does physical access to schools. In addition to offering an outline of these research findings, this presentation will suggest relevant implications and practical solutions for teachers of writing in U.S. high schools and colleges.
“The Politics of Playing Together Nicely: An Exploration of the (Dis)connection Between Pedagogy, Literacy, and Assessment”
Michael Hilbert and Thomas Pickering
Washington State University
Working from Brian Huot’s claim that “meaningful assessment design requires that the assessment be site-based, locally controlled, context sensitive, and rhetorically based,” and, additionally, placement and assessment practices “should be consistent with current research and theories on language learning and literacy,” our presentation will attempt to contextualize and examine the ways placement and assessment practices within composition programs intersect with current literacy theories, and common pedagogical practices (Huot, et al. 10).
Ideally, placement and pedagogical theory would mutually inform each other, and the criteria for placement exams would match the criteria used to assess freshman composition papers within any one university. However, oftentimes this is not case; economic and material concerns—increasing enrollment, for example—impede clear dialogue between assessment, literacy, and pedagogy. Our paper explores the disconnect between popular placement methods and pedagogical theory and practice. We argue that various economical, institutional, material, and discursive factors constrain the relationship between pedagogy and placement. To negotiate these constraints, we suggest that placement administrators and composition scholars pursue pedagogical theories that account for, rather than ignore, the social and material realities of a particular university within that institution’s local context.
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Assessing Assessment: Testing to Teach What We Want to Teach (Workshop)
M. Elizabeth (Betsy) Sargent
University of Alberta
Given the increasing pressure for quantitative assessment and accountability in higher education, those of us developing writing programs need to articulate what it is we do in our courses. Since all assessment teaches (and often unintentionally teaches things we don’t want to teach), we need to develop ethical assessment tools that support our curricula and that also allow us to share with stakeholders (deans, parents, legislators) numbers we can stand behind.
At the University of Alberta, we’ve been using a 50-question Writing Strategies Inventory (WSI) for program assessment of our new first-year course, Writing Studies 101 (based on a writing-about-writing approach): we want to know what the course is doing well and not so well. I first developed the WSI in Oregon in the 1990’s, but extensively revised it to better support our course objectives (including the conceptual model of writing expertise developed by Anne Beaufort); a rich database has been created to help us collect, query, and analyze the resulting data (2007-2012). 100% of WRS 101 students complete the WSI online during the first week of classes (as part of the instruction in the course) and once again at end of term, receiving (as an aid to reflective practice in composing their portfolio cover letters) three individual graphs representing any changes throughout the term in their writing behaviours or their attitudes toward and understandings of the writing process.
Students are also asked to select and write about several of their paired responses that particularly intrigue them. The WSI thus helps students and instructors focus on building together a richer and more useful conception of writing expertise that will transfer to each student’s subsequent courses and writing tasks. The WSI can also widen our understanding of valid and reliable ways to assess writing programs and offers a critique of/ alternative to many current forms of writing program assessment.
Room 305:
Session One: 10:15 - 11:15
How to Use Bulletin Boards with Online or Online-Hybrid Classes to Build Learning Communities (Workshop)
Maren Anderson
Western Oregon University
One criticism of online learning is that students can feel alienated because they need face-to-face time to connect with the teachers and/or subject matter.
I would argue this need not be so. Today’s college-aged students have grown up gleefully debating and fostering friendships on social media sites with people whom they may never meet.
The challenge for educators is to use the online format to our advantage when designing our lessons. Fundamental to this approach are effective discussion questions on bulletin boards.
Most Learning Management Systems—including Moodle, BlackBoard and WebCT—are equipped with bulletin board systems. The trick for instructors is constructing and posting questions which foster actual discussion, ideally encouraging students to work together to solve problems by building on each other’s answers.
This workshop will model this kind of online discussion, and attendees will leave with tools to help them design community-building forums for their classes.
Session Two: 11:25 - 12:25
Writing Bridges Over the Seas: Connecting Rhetoric and Practice in an International Writing Center
Christine Murray
University of Colorado – Denver, International College at Beijing
In the international writing center, the ESL-student of L2 writing and the L1 tutor who reads it form lasting connections grounded in Contrastive Rhetoric (CR): considerations of writing as linguistic, cross-cultural, educational (Connor, Kaplan). As many have shown, CR has its limits, even if it’s also a worthwhile ideal. Matsuda identifies static assumptions underlying CR--mainly that it overlooks how dynamic and multi-faceted are the lasting connections between writer and reader. Further elaborating these assumptions, Kuboda and Lehhner (2004) call for a reconsideration of CR’s aims, outlining a “Critical Contrastive Rhetoric.” Yet both overlook an a priori assumption that is, arguably, also rather static: Sapir-Whorf assumes one’s first language always grounds one’s perception. Yet, just how stable is this notion in hands-on, L2 writing?
From the perspective of f-2-f international writing center work, my paper will revisit and explore this theoretically “ bumpy road.” I ask, what is useful for international writing centers in this paradoxical, instructional triad of groundings and assumptions? Specifically, in what ways does Sapir-Whorf seem static? In what ways might it work as an advantage? Primarily, I explore how student writers learn contrastively to use as their L1 advantageously, rather than as the “interference” assumed by CR (Kubota and Lehner). My paper applies these questions to two case studies of Chinese students revising L2 college essays and writing journals focused to what they are learning about ESL. In all, I will consider some possible “bridges” that international writing centers can “build,” moving forward for writers.
Historical Intersections: A Writing Center Case Study
Crystal Mueller
University of Wisconsin Oshkosh
As a new writing center director takes the wheel, she or he often inherits a writing center; the director and center often share little history. The director’s and center’s histories intersect in ways that require both to adapt and to use as an advantage that all is in a constant state of change. The inherited center has arisen within an institutional context with specific administrative and political circumstances. It bears an institutional reputation. It carries its own policies and traditions that can be altered but that are, nonetheless, established. It has an established location. It has a staff. The writing center director, too, has a history, a specific path that has prepared her or him for the teaching, research, and service required to successfully direct a writing center. The successful writing center director quickly adapts, finding ways to steer along the open road of endless possibilities ahead while navigating the ruts of institutional history and practice.
This presentation offers a case study of the triumphs and challenges of steering through such intersections, amid tenuous staff turnover, burgeoning needs for writing curriculum support for students and faculty stemming from general education reform, concerns over retention in difficult budget years, etc. The presentation, supported with research in writing center administration, describes the ways the writing center director continues to work to grow a writing center with greater institutional relevance and enhanced campus partnerships. It claims that a healthy writing center must pave its own way.
Session Three: 1:45 - 3:00
No Discourse Community is an Island: Discursive Intersections in FYC, Writing Centers, and Service Learning (Panel)
Alison Cardinal, Anthony Warnke, Zach Beare
University of Washington – Tacoma, Seattle University, University of Washington – Tacoma
Genre scholar Charles Bazerman explains that a discourse community "identifies a grouping of people who share common language norms, characteristics, patterns, or practices as a consequence of their ongoing communications .” While Bazerman’s definition emphasizes the discourse community as an isolated unit, the intersections of discourse communities define them as much as their isolation. This panel will explore the many ways that discourse communities intersect and how an ongoing examination of those intersections can better inform writing pedagogies. Alison Cardinal will present her findings of her ongoing studies of teaching students about discourse communities in an effort to make students’ skills gained in FYC more transferable. By teaching students how to identify discourse communities and learn the rules of the genres that operate within those discourse communities, Alison has discovered that students are better able to write across the disciplines. Zach Beare will discuss his recent work examining writing centers as sites of discursive and disciplinary intersections and (sometimes violent) collisions. Zach will examine the precarious position writing center personnel find themselves in as individuals faced with expectations of expertise at the same time that they routinely work with students from disciplines very alien to their own. Though the dissonance in discourse community backgrounds can often lead to tensions between the writer and writing tutor, Zach will discuss the potential for writer empowerment and cultivation of discourse community metaknowledge. Anthony Warnke will discuss the role of intersecting and conflicting discourse communities in FYC service-learning experiences. Anthony will explore the rhetoric of Seattle University students in their blog posts and argumentative essays about tutoring in economically disadvantaged schools. He will analyze how many presumptions SU students make about their students' abilities and cultures derive from unintentionally universalizing the uses of language, behavior, and ideology of their own discourse communities. Anthony will demonstrate how the use of linguist James Paul Gee's ideas of discourse can help students see their own values as contingent on their discourse communities. A roundtable discussion will follow the presentations.
Session Four: 3:15 - 4:30
“Desperately Seeking Conversation: Collaboration, Community, and the Common Core” (Panel)
Vicki Tolar Burton, Nancy Knowles, Jean Knight, Caroline LeGuin, and Eva Payne
Oregon State University, Eastern Oregon University, Oregon Institute of Technology, Portland Community College – Sylvania, Chemeketa Community College
COWT (congenial Oregon community college and university writing teachers) seek meaningful conversation with high school colleagues. Let’s explore the impact of the Common Core K-20. We are alignment- and assessment-curious. Willing to experiment. The goals of this workshop are to exchange insider knowledge, share resources, form alliances, and develop LTR among colleagues.
*(Sponsored by OWEAC, the Oregon Writing and English Advisory Committee: Since 1974 supporting Oregon teachers of writing from high school through university)
Session Five: 4:45 - 6:00
Write-of-Way or Write-of-Passage? Empowering Writers at the Secondary/Postsecondary Intersection (Panel)
Donna Evans, Nancy Knowles, Heidi Harris, Jacob Harris, and Elizabeth Becker
Eastern Oregon University
One of the strengths of American higher education is access. Anyone with the money (or loans) and initiative can embark on a college education. Access, however, poses problems associated with preparation, as secondary teachers labor to ensure student readiness and college teachers attempt to meet incoming students’ needs. In Oregon, the stakes for all concerned escalate with the 40-40-20 goal calling for more students to achieve greater educational success in less time. This goal perpetuates the focus in American education on the end result, in this case the degree, rather than the learning occurring en route. This focus results, for example, in haphazard dual-enrollment programs that fail students when they award credits without the teacher dialogue and classroom learning necessary to ensure students can meet course objectives.
In response to this push for speed, secondary and postsecondary writing teachers need to build alliances to pave a “write-of-way” that ensures high-school graduates have acquired skills necessary for college-level writing and that college-level skills are accurately transcripted. In creating an effective “write-of-way,” these alliances must explore first-year college writing as a “write-of-passage,” a true cognitive leap from high-school to college-level work but also an emotional shift in identity from learner to self-directed scholar. This panel will explore the “write-of-passage” occurring in first-year writing classrooms at Eastern Oregon University, particularly the supports necessary to ensure success for underprepared students, as a means of reconsidering the “write-of-way” between high school and college writing classrooms.
For More Information
At A Glance
What: 2012 Oregon Rhetoric & Composition Conference
Where: Western Oregon University, Monmouth, Oregon
When: Saturday, April 14, 2012, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Why: To present, share, and collaborate on ideas.
How: Participants may print a registration form here, or may register on the day of the conference. Maps, directions, parking instructions, and lodging may be found here.
Where: Western Oregon University, Monmouth, Oregon
When: Saturday, April 14, 2012, 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Why: To present, share, and collaborate on ideas.
How: Participants may print a registration form here, or may register on the day of the conference. Maps, directions, parking instructions, and lodging may be found here.